3D Printed Car Is Half The Weight But Just As Safe

Could we soon be driving a 3D printed car to our 3D printed house and eating 3D printed food for dinner? Jim Kor, who heads Kor Ecologic, has created a 3D printed car called the Urbee 2.

We saw the first design, Urbee, back in 2010. This updated three-wheel, two-seater vehicle is 10 feet long and takes a total of 2,500 hours to print from start to finish. Urbee 2 has a lightweight construction, weighing just 1,200 pounds.

The design puts a tubular metal cage around the driver and Kor is making safety a priority, saying he wants the car to be as safe as the ones that race at Le Mans. Wired provides more details about Urbee 2:

Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. The printers he uses create ABS plastic via Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). The printer sprays molten polymer to build the chassis layer by microscopic layer until it arrives at the complete object. The machines are so automated that the building process they perform is known as “lights out” construction, meaning Kor uploads the design for a bumper, walk away, shut off the lights and leaves. A few hundred hours later, he’s got a bumper.